Complete HarpWeek Explanation:In this cartoon Thomas Nast presents a careful
parody of illustrator Robert Seymour's celebrated initial plate to Charles
Dickens' landmark novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Better known
as The Pickwick Papers, this book appeared serially in 1836-1837. The tale
begins as Mr. Samuel Pickwick, Esq., "mounted into the Windsor Chair on
which he had previously been seated, and addressed the club he himself had
founded."

Here, Greeley is in the title role, and in place of the fifteen individuals
represented in Seymour's steel-plate etching, Nast's Greeley-Pickwick is
surrounded by an ill-matched group of Liberal Republicans, Democrats, and
mavericks, each with his own agenda. The banner overhead aptly begins,
"Extremes Meet Here." This satire, "The Cincinnati Convention, In
A Pickwickian Sense", bore the subtitle: "Horace Pickwick. 'Men and
Brethren! A new leaf must be turned over, or there are breakers ahead. The
Cincinnati Convention may prove a fiasco, or it may name the next
President.'" This line is taken verbatim from Greeley's Tribune editorial
of January 29.

The placards on the walls range from "The Millennium Has Come" to
"After This-Peace" (on the drapery valence), a reference to Greeley's
appeal for universal amnesty of former Confederates. The hypocrisy of the
Liberal Republican Convention is emphasized by juxtaposing signs proclaiming
liberal highmindedness-"The Liberal Infallibles" (an allusion to the
recent decree of Papal infallibility)-with signs promoting political
expediency-"Anything to Beat Grant"; and by signs pointing out the
contradictory nature of the convention-goers: free-traders and protectionists,
Democratic Republicans and Republican Democrats. Although this cartoon features
Greeley, the poster on the left-back wall, reading (in part) "For Vice
Pres. A Protectionist," places Nast in line with most political observers
who expected Greeley, a trade protectionist, to be selected as the convention's
vice-presidential nominee.

The "club" members are (clockwise from the editor's left): Frank
Blair, 1868 Democratic vice-presidential nominee; Senator Carl Schurz, organizer
of the Liberal Republicans of Missouri; Governor B. Gratz Brown of Missouri, of
whom the cartoonist obviously had no portrait; former Confederate president
Jefferson Davis; Horatio Seymour, 1868 Democratic nominee for president; former
president Andrew Johnson; Fernando Wood, Democratic congressman and former mayor
of New York City; Senator Thomas Tipton of Nebraska; Supreme Court justice David
Davis, nominated for president in February by the Labor Reform Convention at
Columbus, and understood to be available for both the Liberal Republican and
Democratic nominations; George Francis Train, eccentric author, lecturer, and
quasi-politician; as well as Liberal Republican senators Reuben Fenton of New
York and Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. Notice that in contrast to the others, the temperance-minded Greeley has a glass of water to drink.